


Who Is This Man, What Sort Of Devil Is He?

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:11:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Peter's kidnapping, both Elizabeths wonder what kind of man they had married.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Is This Man, What Sort Of Devil Is He?

She wonders about this woman, every time Peter talks about “the other world at the bottom of the lake”. Elizabeth knows how she must be feeling now that her son is gone; it wasn’t that long ago that she had felt that way herself after they lost their own Peter. But in a way, she thinks it must be worse for the other Elizabeth. At the time, she had believed there was no hope. Peter was dead; he wasn’t coming back. But for the other Elizabeth, she must be hanging on to some hope that one day, Peter would return to her. The uncertainty must be making things worse for her.

She wonders if Walter realises quite how cruel he is being. Does he not understand what it was doing to Peter, keeping him away from his real parents and trapped in a world he knows is not his own? And to the other Elizabeth and Walter, constantly wondering what had happened to Peter, never knowing if they would ever see him again. Yet if Walter ever did find a way to return Peter to the other side, then Elizabeth would have to endure losing him again, to relive the pain she had felt when their son had died. And in some ways this would be worse for her, to know that there was another Peter out there and yet she could never see him again. There is no course of action that would not put at least one of them through unimaginable pain.

Every time she looks at Peter, tells the same lie, excuses a mistake she’s made when he tests her by claiming that he’s just confused because he was so ill, a flash of anger at Walter for placing her in this situation mingles with the guilt she feels at the lies she’s telling Peter. Every time she sees Walter’s friend Nina, she looks at the bionic arm where Nina’s own arm should be and recoils in horror as she thinks My husband did this to you. . And when Walter talks about those children in Jacksonville he’s experimenting on, speculates that he can one day use them to return Peter to his own universe, Elizabeth’s stomach churns. He mentions one called Olivia, a girl he suspects of being hit by her stepfather, and his reaction to that was to wonder how he could manipulate that in order for her to cross between universes? What sort of man had she married?

And when Peter finally started to accept her explanation that he’d been confused because of his illness, and eventually stopped talking about another world under the lake, Elizabeth wondered not only what sort of person Walter was, but what sort of person he had made her become. The Elizabeth she had been before William introduced them had been outgoing; now, she is relieved that she and Walter had lived such an isolated life, because she has no friends she has to lie to. Nina, William and Carla Warren are the only people they see on a regular basis, and they all know the truth. And yet at the same time, when she ever does meet people who ask her about Peter’s childhood, Elizabeth is forced to lie, and she feels so uncomfortable with that that she finds herself backing away from the people anyway and isn’t able to form any lasting relationships. 

In some ways, it had been easier for Elizabeth when Peter was refusing to accept her as his mother, although she would never have believed that at the time. At least when he was lashing out and denying her, she felt it was what she deserved for lying to him every day. But now, when he does accept her, when he trusts her, Elizabeth finds it even more of a struggle to get through the days with him. She knows somewhere deep down that drinking isn’t the way to handle this. It would be so easy for her to have a few too many, then one day blurt out the truth to Peter about where he was really from. But she also cannot see any other means of escape from this situation, any way of living with herself.

If Walter ever did find a way to get Peter back home, the other Elizabeth could look her son in the eye. And she could look at herself in the mirror and know she still had her integrity, her goodness. She would not have become a liar, in the way that Elizabeth had. She would still be able to recognise the person looking back at her.

 

When Elizabeth looks at Walter, she no longer recognises the man she married. (She can’t raise a smile at the thought that that was literally true; she still doesn’t understand how she managed to watch the other Walter lead Peter away, to hold a conversation with him, and not know that the man in front of her was not her husband. As Walter himself had pointed out, the other man didn’t even dress like him.)

Every time Walter had fired a question at her, come up with a new theory and asked whether she thought it might be true, she wondered if secretly he was thinking that she had lied, that she knew more than she was letting on about the night Peter had disappeared. Someone having had plastic surgery to make himself look exactly like Walter, or her own flippant remark about an alien – they had sounded insane, (and had she but known it at the time, the truth was equally insane, if not more so) – yet Elizabeth knew that she would have preferred either of them to have been proved to be true than to have Walter continually wonder if she was a liar. He had told her that he believed her, yet her story sounded so implausible that she wouldn’t even have believed it herself had someone told it to her, so why should Walter believe her? The one thing that had kept Elizabeth going was that she knew herself not to be a liar.

It had scared her to watch Walter’s descent into alcoholism. Yet the Walter standing before her now, vowing destruction on the other universe, scares her even more. The day he told her he’d found out where Peter was, he told her what the girl from the other universe had told him, about her stepfather hitting her. Elizabeth had been shocked by the lack of compassion he had displayed towards this girl. She was just a child, and she was clearly in pain. Surely she wasn’t the monster Walter was making her out to be. And Elizabeth began to wonder what kind of man she had married. She’d been determined to hold on to what they had, to make their marriage work. But as he began to talk about the destruction of an entire universe, Elizabeth had no longer been sure whether she wanted to be in this marriage, and it had begun to feel like a relief when Walter started spending time with that Reiko, the mistress she still pretends not to know about.

Sometimes Elizabeth wonders about the other Elizabeth, the one who is bringing Peter up as her own. She wonders what kind of care she takes of Peter, whether Peter has accepted her as his mother or whether he still thinks about the woman who gave birth to him. And she wonders what kind of relationship she has with her version of Walter, whether their marriage is surviving or whether it is crumbling under the strain.

But Elizabeth knows she must remain strong. Some day, in her future, she hopes that she will see Peter again, and she has to be strong for him, for their future.

She just has to decide whether that future includes Walter.


End file.
